Ark: Survival Evolved's New Grappling Hooks, Anti-Cheat

Update your lists, gang: another video game has added a grappling hook and so become a Real Video Game. Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] is the latest to realise what’s actually, really, properly, genuinely important to video games. You can even grapple onto dinosaurs. Even flying ones.

Dear lower-case-v video lower-case-g games, I hope you’re enjoying your baby numbers and noises and data and pictures and words and emotions, but I hope you buck your ideas up. Swing on by when you’re ready to talk. A xx

In less clear-cut news, yesterday’s Ark update added the BattlEye Anti-Cheat system, as seen before in Arma games and DayZ. In theory, it’ll catch cheaters and smash them. In reality, hm, while I’ve not encountered BattlEye myself, I gather some folks are unhappy with it. Anyway, talk of effectiveness, false positives, and bugs aside, there’s one definite bummer about it.

BattlEye is currently not ready for Mac or Linux, so we have temporarily disabled the capability of Mac/Linux clients to connect to BattlEye Servers,” developers Studio Wildcard explain. That’s all official servers. They hope to have that fixed within “within the coming few days.”